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Johanna didn't start with fundamentalist Christian behaviour. She began with a diametrically opposed fundamentalism: New Age. She had claimed to have had supernatural experiences from the age of eleven onward, which she now believes was inherited from her great-great aunt, Dixie Jarratt Haygood, a vaudeville performer whose tricks were easily replicated by those that knew them. To this day Johanna asserts they were real and she inherited real psychic powers.[1] She would make even more outlandish claims about Haygood in her autobiography, including some that were demonstrably wrong, like the claim that Haygood died in the 1920s,[2] when in fact she died in 1915.[3]. Michaelsen would later claim she learned how to use her psychic powers from Silva method, and that people were invited to test them to demonstrate the method. Yet James Randi states that tests to demonstrate the validity of the Silva Method are actually discouraged.[4] Her experiences with Silva Method would lead her deeper into the New Age path were she would immerse herself in another popluar phenomenon of the 1970s-Psychic surgery.

During the 1970s Michaelsen claimed to have worked with a psychic surgeon, Pachita, who clamed to do lung transplants, remove impossible tumours and the like,[5] despite considerable evidence that the psychic healer named "Pachita" was far less than claimed.[6] After visiting a Christian centre in Switzerland, she would be convinced that her occult experiences were not from Jesus but Satan! Thus would lead to her conversion and end up as the fundamentalist we would know today. Her story of her "occult" experiences pre-conversion shot her into fundie superstardom and she became a beacon for other forms of wingnuttery, like the promoting of Lauren Stratford[7], whom she was probably the biggest defender of as Michaelsen supposedly took Stratford into her home for months[8] and was also a champion of Mike Warnke.[9] But there's more! Michaelsen was also instrumental in telling Christian parents the evils of cartoons like He-Man and She-Ra as well as Dungeons & Dragons.[10][11] It even turns out that she was Hal Lindsey's sister-in-law! (until he left Johanna's sister for a Bible study student).[12]

Despite being long-discredited, Michaelsen today has her own ministry and still warns against the evils of Ramstein[13] and against Halloween,[14] despite making a lot of false, poorly-researched claims on the holiday,[15] trying to make a comeback after all these years hoping everyone forgets what happened with Stratford and Warnke it seems! Despite not making major mentions of Warnke or Stratford in public, it still seems that after all these years Michaelsen believes that Satanic Ritual Abuse is real as evidenced by the fact that on her ministry website she links to Gregory Reid,[16] someone who explicitly and clearly defends Lauren Stratford despite offering no counter evidence to what evidence has been presented.[17]